Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

Examples of suicide also surrounded Seneca, reminders that the path of “freedom,” as he had called it in De Ira, was always open. Two cases greatly impressed him, both involving enslaved gladiators forced to fight in the arena. Finding their plights intolerable, both men resolved to die, despite being constantly under guard. One man contrived to visit a privy and force the lavatory sponge down his throat, choking himself to death. Another, while being driven to the arena on a cart, drooped toward the ground as though falling asleep, then inserted his head between the wheel spokes so that its rotation broke his neck. Despite almost total powerlessness, these men had found release. Meditating on these examples, Seneca takes on the gloomy question of whether one should commit suicide to preempt a death that is certainly coming. To endure torture or wasting disease is brave, he concludes, but to do violence to oneself and end these conditions is also brave. He cites arguments on either side, then admits, uncharacteristically, that he cannot make up his mind. Seneca had reason to dwell on such topics. His relationship with Nero had become a kind of captivity, or else a wasting disease, likely to kill him in the end. He was dying every day, just as surely, and even more slowly, than the rest of suffering humanity. But his plight was not wretched enough to call for the final solution—at least, not yet. Indeed there are passages in the Letters, and in his other late prose work, Na...